I'm a libertarian lawyer and college professor. I blog on religion, history, constitutional law, government policy, philosophy, sexuality, and the American Founding. Everything is fair game though. Over the years, I've been involved in numerous group blogs that come and go. This blog archives almost everything I write.
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Thursday, December 25, 2014

FEE: "Charles James Fox, Valiant Voice for Liberty"

George III viewed Fox as perhaps his most dangerous adversary, saying
he had “cast off every principle of common honour and honesty . . . as
contemptible as he is odious . . . aversion to all restraints.” Literary
lion Samuel Johnson wondered “whether the nation should be ruled by the
sceptre of George III or the tongue of Fox.”

Dressed in a blue frock-coat and a yellow waistcoat—colors later adopted by the Whig party as well as the Whig journal Edinburgh Review—Fox
championed liberal reform during the 1780s. For example, he advocated
complete religious toleration. This meant expanding the Toleration Act
(1689), which required that to legally serve as a clergyman a religious
Dissenter must acknowledge the divinity of Christ—a measure specifically
aimed at Unitarians. Fox also favored abolishing religious tests to
exclude Dissenters from political office.

Although Fox seemed to embrace the Church of England, he opposed using
coercion to support it. As he declared in 1787: “It was an irreverent
and impious opinion to maintain, that the church must depend for support
as an engine or ally of the state, and not on the evidence of its
doctrines, to be found by searching the scriptures, and the moral
effects which it produced on the minds of those whom it was the duty to
instruct.”

Fox supported the campaign of fellow Member William Wilberforce to
abolish the slave trade. Fox opposed proposals that it be continued
under government regulation. According to one summary of the debate in
Parliament, May 1789: “he knew of no such thing as a regulation of
robbery or a restriction of murder. There was no medium; the legislature
must either abolish the trade or avow their own criminality.” But for
the moment, proposals to abolish the slave trade went nowhere.